Daemon of the Dark Wood (7 page)

Now he was sixty years old, and he could feel his life winding down. While he maintained enough physical strength to meet the rugged demands of his chosen way of life, some of his inner fire had gone out of him. Worse than that, Earth Mother no longer shared new secrets with him. His visions no longer blazed so gloriously. It was almost as if the earth itself were losing its magic. More likely, the loss of magic was his.

Asa sat on a hollow log beside a small stream of clear water. He turned up the patch, uncovering his empty eye socket, then dipped his hands into the stream and washed his face and bushy beard. The water was cold but it did not refresh him. “Is this my weird?” he asked the mountain stream. “To be hollowed out like a soulless ghoul?”

He could hear no answer in the gurgling flow.

“Mother? Why am I deaf to your songs, though my ears still work?” He wanted to cry, to mingle his tears with the streaming tears of the mountain, but there was no crying in him. He felt nothing but a crushing emptiness within his barrel-chested trunk.

Then it came to him. A long-forgotten conversation with his birth-mother rose from the shallows of his timeworn memory, triggered by his utterance of the word “weird.” Closing his eye, he saw the fire blazing in the hearth and heard his mother’s reedy voice.

“Asa, it come to me tonight what your weird is,” she said.

“What’s a weird, Mama?” He knew from experience that whenever his mother got that faraway look in her eyes, she had been consulting her oracle. It was said that his mother was a witchy woman, but Asa knew his father wouldn’t abide witchy doings, so he therefore knew his mother could not be a witch. She just knew how to read some things that others couldn’t. She could read the stars, the clouds, tea leaves and even the bumps on your head, if she took a mind to.

“Your weird is your destiny,” she explained. “It’s what a body’s put on this earth to do.”

“Then what’s
my
weird?” young Asa asked.

His mother gazed into the fire as though she might be reading something in the leaping flames. Finally she scrunched up her wrinkled mouth and answered. “Your weird is to be the sentry to these hills.”

“Like a lookout?”

“That’s right. A guardian, though you surely ain’t no angel.” Her thin lips formed a skinny smile.

“What do I look out for?” Blue-coated Yankees marched through his imagination. Of all the tales his mother told by the fire, he liked stories of the Civil War the best. Her shivery ghost stories gave him nightmares and he preferred not to hear them.

“Anything bad that might come your way. Anything that would harm you, your home or your people.” Then his mother put a hand on his shoulder and said, “And most especially look out for the Beast that comes out of the earth.”

“You mean like a bear? A mountain lion?”

“No, son. I’m talking about an evil thing that crawls out of the darkest pit to prey on the innocent.”

“You’re talking about the Devil!” Asa couldn’t contain his sudden agitation. The fireplace suddenly became a window open to the fiery depths of Hell. If his mother’s hands hadn’t been on his shoulders, he would have jumped up and run out of the house.

“No. Satan is a fallen angel. This Beast is a
pagan god.
Older than the hills.”

Asa instinctively grasped the concept of a beastly god, and he asked what he was supposed to do if he should see such a being.

“I reckon you’ll know iffen the time ever comes. I pray to God in Heaven you will.”

Then with an admonition never to speak of his weird to anyone else—not even to his father—his mother tossed another log onto the fire and that was the end of the conversation.

As Asa grew older, he more or less dismissed the idea of a beastly god, but the idea of being the sentry of the hills appealed to him and fitted well with his rambling way of life.

Now, Asa the old man looked upon the surface of the mountain stream and saw the ghostly reflection of the hearth fire his mother had laid that cold night so many years ago, and he shivered. “Is it my weird that’s come upon me like the cold fingers of death? But I’m old and brittle. My wick is burnt short.”

A mist formed above the fiery water, and within the mist he saw the nebulous face of his dead mother, saw her gaunt lips moving, heard the watery echo of her raspy words: “Your weird
.”

As the misty vision evaporated, Asa stood on creaking bones and sniffed the air for the scent of the Beast. His twitching nostrils picked up an odd earthy odor he couldn’t identify, and he knew at once that the scent had been there for days, hovering just below his awareness. Age had dulled his sharp sense of smell. He squatted down by the stream, plucked two pebbles from the bottom and stuck a pebble into each nostril. Then he chose a larger pebble and stuck it in his mouth and sucked on it. Breathing through his mouth, the hard taste and smell of the earth filled his senses. After a few minutes he spat the pebble out and removed the smaller ones from his nostrils. He inhaled deeply, then sniffed the air again, his senses cleansed and suddenly keener. Beneath the earthy smell was the pungent, musky odor of a rutting beast, definitely not a deer or any animal with which he was familiar.

Downwind and a long way off from the origin of the smell, he picked up his hickory walking stick, put his eye patch down over his vacant socket, and ambled off to meet his weird.

“So, this is what a pagan god smells like,” he said to the late-afternoon sky. A moment later the sky responded by dropping a dead sparrow at his feet.

Rourke opened an envelope of headache powder and deposited the bitter grains on his tongue, then washed them down with a shot of filmy black coffee that had gone cold on his desk. The headache had come on during his visit to the hospital to see Sheriff Gladstone, and it had grown progressively worse as the day wore on. He tucked his chin to his shoulder and sniffed the armpit of his shirt, confirming that the stink was his own.

“Alice, I’m going home to take a shower and put on a clean shirt.”

Alice Marsh looked up from the dispatcher’s desk, her brow wrinkled with puzzlement. “A shower?”

“Yeah. And don’t look at me like that. I’m not losing it, I just need a shower. When you paged me this morning I was out for my morning run and I didn’t take the time for a shower. Now I’m beginning to offend myself.”

“Why don’t you wash up in the lavatory? I could help you with those hard to reach places.” She winked and flashed him a provocative smile.

Ordinarily, Rourke would have delighted in her flirtation, but now he was not in the mood; the events of the day were weighing too heavily on him, and the burden of his responsibilities as Acting Sheriff only added to the onerous weight. He needed some time alone to think things through and sort them out. He grabbed his hat and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in less than an hour,” he said.

Alice plumped her lips. “You’re no fun.”

On the drive home he reviewed the conversation he’d had with Sheriff Gladstone this morning. With his head bandaged and his eyes blackened, Gladstone looked like a fat raccoon in a turban. The nurse warned Rourke that her patient was “off on a little trip to the Twilight Zone,” and that he probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.

When Gladstone saw Rourke with his hat in his hand, he studied him with a lopsided expression, then said, “Ta hell ya doin’ here, Robber, ya sick? Ya don’t look so good.”

“How you doing, Sheriff?” asked Rourke, standing at the foot of the bed.

“Me? Hell, I can’t get myself up. You got your pocketknife with ya? Cut these damn ropes off me, will ya? I’m spoze to be fishin’ the lake.”

Rourke saw the leather restraints binding Gladstone’s wrists to the hospital bed. Not a good sign. He moved to the side of the bed. “Sorry, boss, I don’t have my knife with me.”

“Shit, son, you outta uniform without ya got a knife.” The lid of his left eye was droopy. His lips were cracked and caked with a chalky mixture of dead skin and dried saliva. A few pieces of white lint clung to the gray stubble sprouting from his chubby cheeks.

“Sheriff, I need to ask you a few questions. About what happened between you and your wife.”

“Gladys? Woman’s a goddamn saint, sho nuff.”

“She is a fine woman,” Rourke agreed. “But why would such a fine woman hit her husband over the head with a skillet?”

Gladstone’s droopy eyelid twitched as a look of confusion twisted up his face. “Damnedest thing, I tell ya what’s the truth! That yowling! On and on. It run her crazy. Right outside the house. Scariest thing I ever heard.”

“What yowling?”

“Gladys … is she all right? I gotta see her. You find your pocketknife?” Gladstone was becoming more and more agitated, yanking his arms against the wrist restraints. His face reddened and a wildness came into his eyes.

“Easy now, Sheriff,” Rourke said, putting a hand on Gladstone’s shoulder. “We’ll find her for you. Everything’s going to be all right. You just take it easy. Get some rest.”

Gladstone sank back into his pillow, his eyelids fluttering, then closing. Thinking he had fallen asleep, Rourke tiptoed toward the door.

“Robber? Ya bring me them worms?” The croak in his voice brought to mind a huge bullfrog.

“Yeah, I got ’em,” he said by way of humoring the man. “Get some rest now, and I’ll meet you at the lake.”

“Good boy,” Gladstone said, closing his eyes again. “Teach ya how to bait a hook the right way.”

That was the way Rourke left him. Gone fishing in the Twilight Zone.

And from there, Rourke’s day hadn’t gone any better. When he got back to the office, he learned that Sarah Melton was missing. The young schoolteacher hadn’t shown up for her summer-school classes at Dogwood High, and subsequently the door to her duplex was found standing open, her car in the driveway, but she was nowhere to be found.

Then truck driver Clark Ellroy reported that after a week on the road, he had come home in the middle of the day to an empty house in Widow’s Ridge; his wife Sybil was missing, and he suspected foul play “because she’s a real homebody and she woulda left me a note if she was going somewhere.”

First, Judy Lynn Bowen; then Gladys Gladstone; and now Sarah Melton and Sybil Ellroy. What the hell was going on? Three women missing from Widow’s Ridge, and one, Gladys Gladstone, missing from Dogwood. Did they, Rourke wondered, have anything in common? Were they members of a secret cult? Victims of a mass kidnapping?

Rourke was at a loss; he could come up with no reasonable explanation for the disappearances, and he found nothing to link them except the coincidence of timing. If it
was
coincidence.

He drove up in front of his secluded house as the sun was edging toward the western horizon. Lucy Fur got up from her favorite spot on the front porch and trotted down to meet him.

“Hey there, girl,” he said, dropping to one knee and hugging the wolfhound. “How’s my Lucy?”

Lucy licked his face and made guttural whining sounds, expressive of her simple joy.

“How’s my best girl? Huh?” He grappled playfully with her, then headed toward the house. He paused at the front door, looked back at the cloud-streaked sunset, and for some inexplicable reason, he felt gooseflesh crawling up his back. He shook it off and went inside for a quick shower.

As much as he wanted this long day to end, he dreaded nightfall.

* * * *

“Dr. Knott?”

The voice pulled him back from the monochromatic chaos, but the bizarre slashes of imagery stayed with him, even as he looked away from the wall-drawing above the empty bed and turned toward the person calling his name a second time.

“Alfred Thorn,” said the tall man with the close-cropped hair, short white beard and amiable affect. “From the college?”

“Oh, yes. Of course,” said Knott, stepping forward to shake the robust man’s proffered hand. He remembered the man’s face—it was hard to forget a guy who was the spitting image of Papa Hemingway—but he couldn’t recall ever having spoken to him, nor could he recall the man’s position at the college. “Good to see you.”

“Some of my students still talk about you,” said Thorn. “You made quite a dent on their impressionable minds. Your lectures on abnormal psych are becoming the stuff of legend.”

“Well, that’s certainly flattering. I think.” The man’s grip was powerful and Knott was glad when he released his hand.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Thorn continued to smile. His Hale-Fellow-Well-Met countenance made it clear that he was not the sort to take offense at being overlooked or forgotten.

“I remember your face,” Knott admitted, “but I don’t recall your department.”

“Anthropology. In fact, I
am
the Anthropology Department. Diminutive but not insignificant.” Thorn chuckled.

“So, Professor, what are you doing in our neck of the woods?”

“I’m here to visit one of your patients, a dear friend of mine. Sharyn Rampling. How’s she doing?”

“I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Thorn, bringing his hand to his mouth. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. Patient confidentiality. I withdraw the question. Though she’s like family to me.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you from your visit,” Knott said in a polite attempt to send the professor on his way.

But Thorn didn’t seem to hear him. He had shifted his gaze to the wall-drawing and was obviously lost in contemplation of the red jumble of lines and shadings. “Fascinating,” he said. “Am I to assume a patient produced that, or is one of your staff experimenting with hallucinogens?”

Knott couldn’t hold back his laughter. He was beginning to like Thorn. The man’s good-natured humor was infectious. “The former, I assure you. As a matter of fact, a catatonic patient. She came out of it long enough to create this modest masterpiece. Even gave it a title, as you can see.”

“Tell me, Doctor, what do you see in it?” Thorn continued to gaze into the drawing, fingering the bristles of his beard as if to stimulate new insights.

“I honestly can’t tell you. It’s just random slashes and swirls of crayon, yet … if you look at it long enough … there’s a suggestion of … I don’t know what. But there’s something there that draws you into it.”